In this Forbes interview, contributor John Nosta introduces us to a teen worth watching: fifteen-year-old Jack Andraka, whose effort to design a nanotube-based sensor for pancreatic cancer detection was initially ignored. The interview taps into some aspects of how innovation occurs and the challenges of bringing new ideas to fruition – aspects which transcend age, [...]

A demonstration that most fundamental biological processes can be implemented in a test tube as efficiently as in live bacteria provides synthetic biology the tools to create a ‘new industrial revolution’, which may or may not lead to more general molecular manufacturing.

Studies in mice with otherwise fatal blood clots have shown that targeting a clot-busting drug to regions where blood flow is blocked restores circulation and increases survival with a much lower, safer dose of the drug.

Nanoparticles made from specific DNA and RNA strands, homogeneous in size, composition, and surface chemistry, proved superior to other nanoparticles in silencing gene expression in tumors in mouse experiments.

Nancy K Mize, PhD, Scientist, Innovator, and CEO of GENOGEN Inc., will continue Foresight’s local Bay Area community events with a lecture “GENOGEN: Regenerating Skin for Life”. GENOGEN is developing products that activate resident skin stem cells to stimulate local areas of regeneration of skin naturally – the way children heal.

Gold nanostars targeted to a protein over-expressed in most cancer cells are shuttled by that protein directly to the cancer cell nucleus where illumination with a laser light releases a drug that deforms the nucleus and kills the cell.

Clinical trials in patients with advanced or metastatic tumors using targeted nanoparticles to deliver a standard chemotherapeutic drug showed tumor shrinkage, even in the case of cancers for which that drug is not normally effective.